Criminal Record Check

Prism Clearance Services provide digital fingerprinting services to the general public located in Cape Town and the surrounding areas. Besides taking an individuals fingerprints at our Table View/Bloubergrand office we are also prepared to travel to a customers location when more than 10 individuals are to be fingerprinted consecutively on the same day.

Most organizations and Institutions require new recruits and personnel to have their criminal record checked against the SAPS fingerprint database in Pretoria. Unlike previous fingerprinting methods where fingerprints were taken using an ink-based system, we use the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) biometric digital fingerprinting method that is used predominantly around the world by law enforcement agencies including the FBI, Europol, Interpol, and the UK Police.

Automated fingerprint identification is the process of using a computer to match fingerprints against a database of known and unknown prints in the fingerprint identification system. Wikipedia

The very first AFIS was created in 1974 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It only contained the so-called minutiae, or the most important points of a fingerprint because it would be too expensive to store whole images. Advantages linked to the AFIS are speedy matching of fingerprints (being 48 hours) as opposed to the cumbersome technique of manual matching (up to 40 days).